beard trimming styles

Beards are coming back in a major way! You just stop and look around you and you’re bound to see at least a few beards. And these aren’t just relatively short cropped beards like your dad might have worn, but these are beards the likes of which we haven’t seen for probably over a century. With epic beards making a pretty epic comeback, there’s no longer any room for beards that are obviously unkempt and merely the product of endless growth, without any kind of styling or trimming. It’s like the equivalent of not having had a haircut after shaving your head. You can’t just let your beard grow out without giving it a little nudge in the right direction.

That being said, it can be difficult to arrive at just the right beard style for your particular face, and then even more so to enact or execute the specific idea that you’ve chosen. After you’ve spent however many weeks or even months growing out your glorious new beard, it can be disheartening and even nerve-racking to go about cutting it down into a particular style or shape. What tools will you need? Can you even do it yourself? Or is it a job for a barber? And just how does one go about achieving certain specific looks? These are all very pertinent questions, but, like so many things in the world, there aren’t any absolutes.

Depending on what exactly you have in mind, you can get closer to or further from a pretty consistent approach to achieving that look, but, again, it all depends. If you’re interested in a short crop, like your dad made famous, attaching a number four comb to your electric hair trimmer and giving it an even and thorough once (or maybe twice) over should provide you with a pretty clean and professional look. That, however, is on the easier side of the spectrum. In fact, that may be the pole of the spectrum on the easy end. If you want anything that breaks from this rather plain mold, the process of trimming and styling is only going to get more involved.

If, say, you’d like to grow a longer, narrower beard, or a massive, bushy beard, you’re going to need to bust out and dust off the trimmer, a good pair of barber sheers and either a fine-toothed comb or a brush, depending on the consistency of your beard. From there, the process only becomes more intricate and nuanced, and will vary in difficulty based on your level of intuition, steadiness of hand, and soundness of nerve. When you’ve finally grown out your whiskers long enough to necessitate some kind of trimming or styling, it’s going to take a bit of planning and a bit of courage, but, at the end of the day, it is only hair, and you’ll do just fine. And if you’re too cripplingly worried about making some kind of irrevocable mistake (again, it’s only hair, so that might mean removing some or all of an ear), then you can always swing by your local barbershop, where someone will be more than happy to lend you a trained and steady hand.